An absorbing legal thriller that’s both powerful and delightfully nuanced.
In this novella, a freshly minted attorney at a prestigious firm becomes suspicious that his superiors are involved in a fraudulent scheme.
Adam Chauncey is as green as a lawyer can get, occupying the lowest rung on the ladder at Smithson and Dwyer, one of the toniest firms in Chicago. He’s invited to lunch by a senior partner, Bill Evans, a strange request that sparks another: The veteran attorney asks Adam to become a co-executor of a will he’s in charge of and refuses to name the document’s author. Naïve and quick to please a superior, Adam reflexively agrees. Suddenly, when Evans shows signs of cognitive diminishment and steps aside, Adam finds himself in charge of a will that represents a considerable estate, one formerly owned by Percy Landsman. The will is complex and peculiar—Percy has left much of his largesse to his estranged brother, Eric, and mentions his “original birth family.” Adam discovers Percy was the product of an illicit affair between an unknown father and a Latine house maid. With tantalizing suspense, Gilbert follows Adam’s gathering suspicions that something is amiss at his own firm, especially when he finds, with the help of Sally Warren—a paralegal for whom he develops romantic affections—a copy of the will. The duplicate document features contradictory scrawled notes. When he turns to his bosses for clarity, he encounters a “conspiracy of silence” or vague threats.
The author skillfully combines an utterly dark subject matter—the furtive exploitation of the dead—with generally lightsome prose and plenty of comic relief, often conveyed in the flirtatious banter between Adam and Sally. They are outsiders in this world of powerful privilege. With great delicacy, Gilbert explores the ways in which both of them are simultaneously (and contradictorily) repulsed by this cosmos and pine to belong to it. In fact, they’re eventually faced with a stark moral dilemma that compels them to choose either their upwardly mobile ambitions or their sense of decency. It’s intriguing to see Adam, an “innocent, gangly young lawyer,” transform from a callow dupe into a more mature man who reflects with depth on what motivates him. When Sally suggests he might be inspired by a sense of justice, he’s uncertain: “That’s a nice way of putting it, but I’m not sure of my motivation anymore, except that something bothered me from the start—and is still bothering me. I thought I had put it to rest. But I guess I hadn’t. And I don’t like the feeling.” While there’s obviously a potent moral dimension to Gilbert’s tale, this is not the literary expression of some stale lesson drawn from a catechism, or a simplistic parable offered in a professorial spirit of didacticism. The author avoids any hint of tendentious proselytizing or facile reductionism. This is a marvelous novella, piercingly intelligent yet thoroughly unpretentious.
An absorbing legal thriller that’s both powerful and delightfully nuanced.Pub Date: Sept. 9, 2023
ISBN: 9781956823219
Page Count: 150
Publisher: Joshua Tree Publishing
Review Posted Online: Nov. 27, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A fresh and clever whodunit with an engaging twist.
A 16-year-old savant uses his Groundhog Day gift to solve his grandfather’s murder.
Nishizawa’s compulsively readable puzzle opens with the discovery of the victim, patriarch Reijiro Fuchigami, sprawled on a futon in the attic of his elegant mansion, where his family has gathered for a consequential announcement about his estate. The weapon seems to be a copper vase lying nearby. Given this setup, the novel might have proceeded as a traditional whodunit but for two delightful features. The first is the ebullient narration of Fuchigami’s youngest grandson, Hisataro, thrust into the role of an investigator with more dedication than finesse. The second is Nishizawa’s clever premise: The 16-year-old Hisataro has lived ever since birth with a condition that occasionally has him falling into a time loop that he calls "the Trap," replaying the same 24 hours of his life exactly nine times before moving on. And, of course, the murder takes place on the first day of one of these loops. Can he solve the murder before the cycle is played out? His initial strategies—never leaving his grandfather’s side, focusing on specific suspects, hiding in order to observe them all—fall frustratingly short. Hisataro’s comical anxiety rises with every failed attempt to identify the culprit. It’s only when he steps back and examines all the evidence that he discovers the solution. First published in 1995, this is the first of Nishizawa’s novels to be translated into English. As for Hisataro, he ultimately concludes that his condition is not a burden but a gift: “Time’s spiral never ends.”
A fresh and clever whodunit with an engaging twist.Pub Date: July 29, 2025
ISBN: 9781805335436
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Pushkin Vertigo
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
A top-class cozy infused with dry wit and charming characters who draw you in and leave you wanting more, please.
Four residents of Coopers Chase, a British retirement village, compete with the police to solve a murder in this debut novel.
The Thursday Murder Club started out with a group of septuagenarians working on old murder cases culled from the files of club founder Elizabeth Best’s friend Penny Gray, a former police officer who's now comatose in the village's nursing home. Elizabeth used to have an unspecified job, possibly as a spy, that has left her with a large network of helpful sources. Joyce Meadowcroft is a former nurse who chronicles their deeds. Psychiatrist Ibrahim Arif and well-known political firebrand Ron Ritchie complete the group. They charm Police Constable Donna De Freitas, who, visiting to give a talk on safety at Coopers Chase, finds the residents sharp as tacks. Built with drug money on the grounds of a convent, Coopers Chase is a high-end development conceived by loathsome Ian Ventham and maintained by dangerous crook Tony Curran, who’s about to be fired and replaced with wary but willing Bogdan Jankowski. Ventham has big plans for the future—as soon as he’s removed the nuns' bodies from the cemetery. When Curran is murdered, DCI Chris Hudson gets the case, but Elizabeth uses her influence to get the ambitious De Freitas included, giving the Thursday Club a police source. What follows is a fascinating primer in detection as British TV personality Osman allows the members to use their diverse skills to solve a series of interconnected crimes.
A top-class cozy infused with dry wit and charming characters who draw you in and leave you wanting more, please.Pub Date: Sept. 22, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-98-488096-3
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Pamela Dorman/Viking
Review Posted Online: June 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2020
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